December’s MagPi was released this morning, and it’s full of Christmas cheer. This month you’ll learn how to make your Pi sing carols with Sonic Pi; and you’ll find out about environmental monitoring, so you can keep your electricity bill down without having to turn off the tree lights.

We’re very taken by the first in a new series on building your own quadcopter: and by the second installment from Project Curacao, where a Pi is dangling from a radio tower twelve degrees north of the equator working on environmental monitoring, which makes us feel the cold and dark in Cambridge something rotten.

There’s plenty for beginners, with a continuation of Jake Marsh’s button and switch tutorial (if you’re looking for the earlier part of any of these series, they’re all available for free in back-copies of The MagPi); an OpenELEC tutorial and a tour of the Pi Store. And, of course, that Sonic Pi tutorial, where you’ll be able to program your Pi to play Good King Wenceslas with ease, even if this is the first time you’ve plugged a Raspberry Pi in.

One of our favourite projects this month is the electronic painting tutorial using XLoBorg, where you’ll find yourself Pollocking the night away. And on the practical side of things, you’ll find out how to add an LCD display to your projects via GPIO, and use it to scroll text.

The MagPi is a magazine produced by the Raspberry Pi community for the Raspberry Pi community. It will always be free to download; but if you prefer a physical magazine you can also buy print copies, thanks to the team’s successful Kickstarter. All the back issues are available for you to download, and they’re full of tutorials, interviews, type-in listings and everything you’ll need to get started with a Raspberry Pi.

Team MagPi is always looking for people to join them: at the moment they are particularly in need of volunteers to help with layout (you should be a Scribus user), and testers. You can get in touch with them via the MagPi website – tell them we sent you!

£250 seems quite an expensive Quadcopter kit. I wonder if you could just buy an off-the-shelf quadcopter and mod it for Pi connectivity – Might work out cheaper? I’m getting a £50 quadcopter for Xmas. BTW – MagPi is looking great.